Reaper Man

Reaper Man is a fantasy novel by the English writer Terry Pratchett, published in 1991. It is the eleventh Discworld book and the second of them to have Death as its central character.

The Auditors are formless beings whose concern is that the universe should run efficiently, and they have concluded that a Death with opinions is a fault to be corrected. With permission from a higher authority they force him into retirement and give him a device containing the amount of sand that represents what remains of his own life, which is a piece of equipment he has previously used on other people.

Death goes to work as a farmhand in a village, under the name Bill Door, for an elderly woman called Miss Flitworth, and much of the novel is about what an immortal being makes of ordinary human living once he has nothing else to do. In Ankh-Morpork, meanwhile, the bureaucratic arrangement has had consequences: people whose time had come are not dying, the city begins to fill with the undead, and a very old wizard named Windle Poons finds that he has been given an afterlife he did not ask for.